Four Headlines from 2014 that weren't Gendered and Should Have Been: 2. ISIS's War on 'The War on Terror'

@GendertheNews

The rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria and its catalysing effect on other parts of the Middle Eastern (Yemen) and Central African (Nigeria*) region dominated news headlines in 2014 and on into 2015. Gender is fundamentally entwined in to this situation. This is actually what I will be writing my undergraduate dissertation about so I will attempt to remain as concise as possible! Whether you interpret them as a barbaric by-product of two decades of gruesome western foreign policy, simply the violent warpath of brutal religious extremism or a combination of the two, it should go without saying that the catastrophic violence spreading through Iraq and Syria since last summer is having hideous consequences for both men and women. For the most part, the western media is yet to catch on that they are supplying oxygen to the Islamic State’s war on the ‘War on Terror’. Especially when it comes to women. For a brilliant article on this see Owen Jones. There is speculation that perhaps ISIS would like western intervention as it would only fuel their cause to have more members of local communities murdered by western soldiers. And arguably it would give them recognition as a state. Yet the majority of said press remains staggeringly gender blind. There is no way to look at ISIS without seeing their direct exploitation of both femininity and masculinity; it is their modus operandi and it is working.

Photo Source: http://i100.independent.co.uk/article/how-should-newspaper-front-pages-cover-isis-propaganda-videos--gJ2bKfo9Hl

Much of the original War on Terror hinged on the discourse of ‘women and children’ and employed the ‘protection myth’ to justify intervention. (Tickner & Sjoberg, 2010: 205.) This protection dichotomy assumes weak, passive women (with their children) in need of protection and strong, aggressive men ready to protect and has historically been used as a justification of war. Obama and others in the coalition are still using it today to justify air strikes in the region**. ISIS knows this. Everyday they have to think of another atrocious act they can commit to rile the West and using women and children to do so is written into the very constitution of the Islamic State. Recently there were reports of the introduction of mandatory FGM in the region, these have been denied, but given the blatant misogyny of this act it does not seem beyond ISIS’s shock tactics. Likewise, systematic and strategic rape, gendered recruitment of foreign fighters and prizing masculinity upon violence and sexual prowess are just a couple of the gendered analytics fundamental to understanding how and why ISIS have been so successful. Unfortunately sexual violence is no new phenomenon, especially not in the region. Whilst other terrorist organisations may not lop of the heads of western journalists on Youtube, militaries and insurgents have been raping women for strategic objectives throughout history: civil wars in Sierra Leone, Bosnia and DCR are just some of the extreme examples. Women, men, girls and boys bodies are being employed as the currency of the Caliphate. Systematic rape and sex trafficking of Christian, Yazidi and Kurdish women is used as psychological and physical warfare that serves to dishonour families and communities.

Foreign fighters and the spread of both ‘radical Islam’ and Islamaphobia throughout the globe is also a profoundly gendered problem. Men and women from western states, who chose to go and join ISIS, in whatever capacity, are presented vastly differently in the mainstream press. Women and girls are presented as being ‘sexually groomed’ into becoming Jihadi brides. Whilst men and boys are immediately criminalised and demonised by the press as members of Bush’s ‘axis of evil.’ Are these men not being groomed also? These discourses serve the triple purpose of removing any kind of political agency from women, employing neo-colonial/orientalist discourse about 'othered' foreign men and ‘pure’ western women and implying that men are inherently violent whilst women can only be coerced into violence by romanticised ideals. Tests of such masculinity can then be seen in ISIS’s frontline media, masculinity is not contingent or varying for ISIS. It is aggressive, misogynistic, violent and relentlessly asserted as dominance over women and other masculinities. Patriarchy is at the heart of the Islamic State but it is also just one of their strategic tactics that allows them to keep the west on puppet strings.

Paradoxically, there have been reports of a Kurdish women’s resistance movement that threatens ISIS because they believe that if they are martyred by women, they will not go to heaven. (Parramore, The AlterNet 2014) The indifference towards death is fundamental to ISIS’s recruitment policy. This could be a resolute turning point in this battle against the Islamic State and exemplifies how if diplomats and the media gave more attention to gendered dynamics, perhaps it could expose ISIL's  Achilles heal. But this would mean disrupting two racial and gendered binaries that are entrenched into both the media and the diplomatic minds of our times. Firstly, the west has always been constructed as powerful and dominating (masculine) whilst the east, particularly the middle east, is therefore constructed as its 'other' as feminised, weak and submissive in both media and academic sources. (Said, 1977.) This leaves Eastern women as the ultimate 'other', they are weak because they are eastern and they are further weak because they are women. Kurdish women fighters turn all of these ideas on their head. An engagement with this tactic would mean a fundamental overhaul of foreign policy and representations of women's political agency. It would also require significant international attention directed towards how these women will then be treated if they return to their daily lives. If these Kurdish women were mobilised, could ISIL indirectly liberate the international arena from stereotypes and binaries?

Al Jazeera Stream 2015 http://stream.aljazeera.com/story/201503111528-0024619 

*I will be posting a separate specific blog on the gendered perspectives of Boko Haram's ascendancy in Nigeria at a later date.

**This is especially ironic in Britain where the Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition has recently cut all funding to legal aid, shelters and support for victims of sexual violence. Many will be shocked at this comparison but arguably rape is rape regardless of its spatial dynamics and part of the problem with the phrase ‘rape as a weapon of war’ as that it allows for rape to be de-sensitised in the West whilst  presented as one homogenous body of evil in war which serves as a justification for air strikes. Dichotomising rape in this way almost suggest 'acceptable rape' and 'unacceptable rape' and the underlying misogyny and racism in this analysis is undeniable. 

Sources:

• Tickner, J.A. & Sjoberg, L. (2010). Feminism. in Dunne, T., Kurki, M. & Smith, S. (2010).  International Relations Theory. Oxford, UK. Oxford University Press
• Gender and War: ISIS (2014) http://www.genderandwar.com/tag/isis/
• Lynn Stuart Parramore (2014) The AlterNet http://www.alternet.org/gender/strange-complex-story-women-and-isis-militants
• The Guardian (2014) Under Isis, Iraqi women again face an old nightmare: violence and repression http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/poverty-matters/2014/jul/03/isis-iraqi-women-rape-violence-repression
• Gendering the Militarisation of the War on Terrorism: http://ethesis.helsinki.fi/julkaisut/val/yleis/pg/repo/genderin.pdf
• Al Jazeera Stream 2015 http://stream.aljazeera.com/story/201503111528-0024619 

Four Big Headlines from 2014 that weren’t Gendered and Should’ve Been: 1. The Ebola Outbreak

@GendertheNews

Welcome to my blog! My first few posts will rewind through 2014 and address several cataclysmic events that shook the world and how gendered analysis provides insight into understanding them further. The first of these is a unique case in that there was some gendered media coverage! So it seems a good place to start:

1.    The Ebola outbreak in west Africa

There was actually quite a large body of journalism on this (see: Washington Post or The Independent) but I could not do a summary of the biggest events in 2014 without mentioning Ebola. The virus has impacted most areas of the globe but much of the media attention was directed towards African states such as Sierra Leone,  Liberia and Guinea and with good reason. The Economist reports that the latest death toll is estimated at the 10,000 mark. Gendering this allows us to see that between 55-60% of these deaths have been women. (Saul, 2014, The Independent.) I would like to emphasise two central gendered points here: firstly, as much of the mainstream media suggests, women have an increased risk of Ebola due to the caring burden. Women are assumed to be the primary caregivers both in the public and private sphere. Therefore an overwhelming percentage of employed nurses and healthcare assistants are women in close contact with the virus in their daily life. Then at home, in the private sphere, women are expected to perform all care labour and unilaterally care for their sick children, regardless of the risk. This sexual division of labour extends around the globe:  the not-for-profit industry is an extremely feminised industry as a result of the perceived essential caring nature of femininity. The volunteering sector is particularly dominated by middle-class women in the west as a result of its flexible nature. Therefore, many aid workers tend to also be women travelling to diseased areas with aid. Indeed, the two cases of Ebola in both Britain and UK were female nurses returning from Sierra Leone.

Secondly, there was a distinct underlying neo-colonial tendency in the press to homogenise Africa and drum out the common rhetoric of ‘Africans’ (particularly African women and children) in desperate need of white, western men’s money to help them. This was particularly poignant in the Band Aid 2014 video in aid of funds to fight Ebola which some African musicians refused to take part in as a result of its potentially racist undertones. Africa is one of the most largely diverse continents in the whole world and deserves more than simply to be depicted as poor and diseased by the western press.

More on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oo8OIbAZcRE&list=PLBAQtIf4z_FYbRQ2CYCg7Hh92LsW_KZyw&index=5

First Post: About the Author

About the Author:

Twitter: @GendertheNews 

Hello, I am a Feminist International Relations Undergraduate with a keen interest in Gender in international politics looking to pursue a career in this field. I started this blog because I am often frustrated when reading the mainstream media and academic publications with how little gendered analysis of events feature. Given the gendered hierarchy in society, happenings in the world always effect women and men differently and often disproportionately. With these posts I am going to attempt to look at current affairs through a relational gendered looking glass. 

I believe it is extremely important to bridge the gap between the often inaccessible/unapproachable academic work and mainstreamed political thought therefore I will try to do this in my writing. I also recognise my feminist bias and privilege as a British, white, western, academic woman but I will always try to maintain a few central principles in my writing:

• Gender equality is a basic right yet despite popular ideas patriarchy* is alive and well in the world.
• Gender is not natural: it is a social expectation attached to the shape of our bodies. 
• Gender is always relational: assumptions about women and femininity always have consequences for men and masculinity and vice versa. 
• Intersectionality is so important. 
• Mainstream media/academic publications rarely analyse events from a gendered perspective meaning that the do not tell the whole story.

I would like to acknowledge so many authors and journalists for the inspirations to start this blog and I will always try to acknowledge them as I go but please see my sources page for further information. I welcome constructive criticism and different ideas. Please share my posts if you find them interesting and follow the twitter account @GendertheNews for regular updates.

*People are often fearful of using/reading the word patriarchy. It simply refers to the hierarchical gender bias towards masculinity and dominance of men in popular society. It is important we claim the word back from misandry!